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Butter Rolls (with Baking Powder)
4 cups Five Roses flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon butter 1 egg (beaten) 1 pint milk.
Sift the flour, salt and baking powder together. Rub in the butter and add the beaten egg. Mix with milk soft as possible. Roll out, cut and dip in melted butter. Fold over and bake quickly.
A quick bread dressed as a dinner roll: no yeast, no rising time, and the folded, buttered shape of a Parker House roll. The original leavening is the one figure worth adjusting.
- Bake it quickly, and hot"Bake quickly" points to a hot oven; in modern terms something around 425-450F. These rolls depend on fast oven spring from the baking powder, and a slow oven gives flat, tough results. Ten to fifteen minutes is usually enough.
- The baking powder is shortTwo teaspoons for four cups of flour is half a teaspoon per cup, well under the modern range of about 1 to 1½ teaspoons per cup. With today's double-acting powder, 4 to 6 teaspoons will give a proper lift.
- A pint is two cupsA pint of milk -- In a Canadian book this may be an imperial pint (20 oz, about 2½ cups) rather than a US pint of 2 cups; either way it gives a very soft, sticky dough. "Mix with milk soft as possible" is the instruction that matters: add the milk gradually and stop when the dough just holds together, then flour the board generously.
- Rub in the butterOne tablespoon is a small amount of fat for this quantity of flour, so work it in cold with fingertips or a pastry blender rather than melting it. The dipping butter afterward does most of the enriching.
- Cut and foldThe recipe says only to roll out, cut, dip in melted butter and fold over. About half an inch thick and a 2½-inch cutter suit it; the butter in the fold keeps it from sealing, so the roll opens cleanly at the table.
- Baking sheet, not a panSet them just touching on a flat sheet so the sides stay soft; spaced apart they crisp all over. Grease lightly or use parchment.
- YieldAbout 20 to 24 folded rolls. They are at their best within an hour of baking and stale by the next day, as chemically leavened breads do.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal, one of the great flour-milling promotional cookbooks of the early twentieth century, distributed in enormous numbers to Canadian households who bought the brand's sacks. The parenthetical "(with Baking Powder)" in the title is doing real work: it tells a cook expecting a yeast dough that this one is chemically leavened. Chemical leavening had been reliably available in tins since the later nineteenth century, and quick rolls of this kind let a household produce hot bread for supper without setting a sponge that morning. The folded, butter-dipped shape belongs to the same family as the American Parker House roll, generally traced to the Boston hotel of that name, though here achieved without any waiting for a rise.